The Zona (9 page)

“Don’t let go of the log,” Terence said.

Terence and Lead drifted towards the deep center of the river.  The water was blood warm; it cleansed Lead’s skin and soothed his wound.  The edges of Lead’s trench coat floated around him.  His mind envisioned fish nipping at his boots.

The two floated south with the current.  They passed through a canyon cut by older, stronger waters and glaciers before that.  Lead stared at the canyon’s edge, at the silhouettes of boulders and brush.  A mountain goat looked down at him, strong and unmoving.  

“They’re beautiful because they can live on anything.”  Terence said, looking at the same creature.  “They lived here before we did, they’ll be here when we’re gone.”

Lead nodded off, the infection tapped his strength.  Warm waters embraced him.  He awoke coughing and sputtering, having dipped too low.  The sun’s placement showed the time to be late afternoon.  Terence floated next to him, both hands holding his knapsack over the water.

“Fall asleep again under water and you’ll wake in the Lord’s arms.”  Terence said with grin.

“What do you know of the Lord?”  Lead said.  “You’re a Church deserter.  The Church gave you Cain’s Mark.  You are a sinner.”

Terence contemplated.  The river current crackled.  Stunted trees and shrubs at the river’s edge nodded with wind.

“Yes, but my sin wasn’t against God.  My sin was against the Church.  Church and God ain’t the same thing.  From what I know, God’s perfect.  The Church makes mistakes.”  Terence kicked his feet to straighten the log in the current.  “God’s about order, Church is about power, as best as I can figure, to be against one is not to be against the other.”

One of his Lead’s boots scraped against a river stone.  He put his other arm through the rawhide loop.

“The word of God comes through the Church.  If the Church were wrong, God would smite the Church and find a new hand to do his will,” Lead said.

Terence laughed.  “By God!  The great contradiction, if the Church is wrong, then God would fix the Church, yeah?  But what about free will?  God granted us free will; or rather we took free will when we ate from the Tree of Knowledge.”

“How does that fit?”  Lead asked.

“Let me ask you, does Jesus sit on God’s right hand?”  Terence asked.

“Yes.”  Lead replied.

“And what does he do there?”  Terence asked.

“He judges the quick and the dead.”  Lead said.

“So Jesus, our Lord, judges us when we die, he looks back upon our lives and determines if we are worthy of the glorious afterlife, correct?”

“Yes.”

“But, according to the Church, if a person does wrong, the Lord will intervene through the Church, right?”

“Yes.”  Lead replied.

Lead looked away from Terence, back to the canyon walls.

“So we’ve established that God and Jesus judge us for our actions and we’ve established that God interferes with our actions through the Church if we do wrong.  So let me ask you, Preacher, why does Jesus judge the quick and the dead if he and his father step in and alter the bad behavior of man?”

“I don’t understand,” Lead said.

“If the Church is right in correcting our actions through the will of God, then why do God and Jesus still judge us in the afterlife?  If we are properly controlled and checked by our Lord through the Church, then entrance into heaven should be assured without judgment, right?”

Lead was silent.

“The way I see it, they both can’t be right.  Bible says you’ll be judged in the afterlife based on what you do in this life.  The Church says its actions are right because God sanctions them and if God didn’t he’d smite them dead.  But if God corrected every little wrong we committed in this life, he and his son would have nothing to judge later on.”

Lead looked back to Terence, the old man’s argument made his fearful.

“The Book says the Anti-Christ will speak of blasphemes,” Lead said.

“The Book says a lot of things, but if I were the Anti-Christ I sure as hell wouldn’t be strapped to a log floating down the Colorado fearing the bullet of a man who may or may not be tracking us down this river.”  Terence shifted to get a better hold of his knapsack.  “Believe me or don’t.  Just consider my words, Preacher.”

Lead was silent again.  The men continued floating past the remains of homes and the remnants of civilized life.

Lead woke to the stars and navy blue of the early evening sky.  Terence was hauling them up a gravel shore.  In the distance the winds of the Storm Border whipped trees and cracked stones over boulders.

“Stay put,” Terence said.  He untied his knapsack and disappeared into the brush.

Lead lay on his back.  He ran his hands over river stones.  The waters had cooled his fever.  His body was still strange and unbalanced, but the fear that he would die was gone.  Lead smiled at the stars.  He would live.  He would continue on.  The sky’s light ebbed and locusts chirped their songs from the brush.  Lead lay still.  The river stones and his drenched coat soothed his fevered skin.  The locusts filled night with their alien callings.  

Lead woke on a bed that shifted and rolled with his weight. His eyes scanned a room of white-washed walls and boarded-up windows.  Cotton sheets scratched his skin.  A lanky, gray-haired stranger stared at him from across the room.  His were eyes hidden behind reflective lenses.

“Hi, uh, good morning,” the man said nervously, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

The man’s glasses sagged slightly on his face.  The frames were squared off and wound with adhesive tape.  Lead sat up and felt a dull pain in his left shoulder.  He pressed his hand against his wound.  It had been packed in a thick poultice.

“We beat the infection,” the man said.  He pulled a brown bottle from the pocket of his blue jeans.

“Penicillin, I make it here.  Makes you pretty lucky I guess.”  The man’s face froze as he realized the error of what he said.  The Church had long ago decreed that the use of drugs was offensive to God as it fought against his inclination to cull the sinner and save the righteous.  Preachers put men to blanket for such offenses.

“What’s Penicillin?”  Lead asked.

“It’s a drug.  It kills infection.  I’m sorry.”  The man looked around the room, as though searching for a place to hide.

“Never heard of it,” Lead said.  “Where am I?”

“C.R.A.S.S.,” the man replied.  “Colorado River Aqueduct Science Station, California side.  We monitor storms, look for patterns, chart strength or winds and the like.”  The stranger was visibly relieved to change the subject.

Lead searched the room again with his eyes.

“So we’re out of the Zona?”

“No,” said the stranger.  “We’re on the border, but not many come around here.  The weather here is too savaged to be any good for colonists.  Church doesn’t know about us.”

“Thank you for helping me heal,” Lead said.

The stranger bowed his head.  His reflective lenses flashed in the light.

“Where’s the old man?”  Lead asked.

“Terence?  He’s here, I’ll get him.”  The man pulled a cord hanging from the ceiling.  A muffled bell sounded in a distant room.

Terence entered the recovery quarters.  His appearance had changed dramatically in the days since his escape on the Colorado River.  He had scrubbed the dirt of the wastelands off his face and hands until they glowed pink.  His mane of gray hair was tied behind his head and rested on a new blue flannel shirt. He stood straight and strong as a man well nourished and well rested.

“Glad you’re back,” Terence said.  He gestured to the stranger.  “This is Eric the Dead, my friend.”

“Why do you call him ‘the Dead’?”

“By all rights he is a dead man.  Years ago, the Church sent me to make him a Goodman, by rope or blanket.  He chose the blanket.”

“It wasn’t as easy as all that.”  Eric said.

“All humility aside, it was that easy.  I stuck a gun in this poor, polite man’s face and asked him how he wanted to attain perfection.  He had the nerve to tell me to shoot him dead.”  Terence looked away from Eric.  “That didn’t work for me. I had stopped shooting people long before.  I couldn’t go against my word and bind him.  It was a problem, a situation.  I had no choice but to let him live.  So instead of punishment I took from him an oath.  He had to change his name and location. He had to help anyone I sent his way.”

“What was his offense?  Why were you sent to apprehend?”  Lead asked.

“No one told me, of course.  Church doesn’t work that way, as you know.  Far as I could tell it had to do with Eric’s profession.  Man was a pharmacist before the Storms, sat on a pretty good stash of medicine and whatnots.  He was doctoring in what remained of the Prescott Parish before being expelled for witchcraft.”

“I’m not a witch,” Eric said defensively.  The accusation still held an obvious weight and pain with the doctor.  “Ignorant peasants didn’t understand the workings of my medicine and assumed magic.”

“The order came, he was designated a mark, I was handed the bounty.  Pretty sure that’s it, not unless he did something unsavory and didn’t tell me.”  Terence looked at Eric and chuckled.  “Wouldn’t that beat all, if you were really a murder or sex pervert or something gruesome, and I still let you go.”

“Why did you stop killing?”  Lead asked.

Terence’s expression turned solemn.  He looked to the boarded window.

“I was a grown man when the Storms struck.  I lost a lot.  Everything that made sense vanished.  You may or may not get what I tell you, but that kind of thing puts a hole in a man.  I joined up with the Guards in California, later we joined with the Zona Militia, Arizona at the time.  I stopped trying to make sense and started following those who told me they understood what was happening.  My life found purpose with the Guards and the Church.  They ordered me to strike the cause of the Storms, to extinguish sin and make the world whole, to do my duty and earn my place in the lesser inherited Earth.  I can’t say I believed them, but at the same time belief didn’t matter.  With them I had purpose.  With them I helped raze Vegas.  With them I swept and crushed the Mexican scavenger parties in the Hot Zones. With them I hunted and murdered or imprisoned enemies of the Church, the marks.  The killings didn’t fill the hole. One day I found myself facing a blanket Goodman in Saint John’s Town and I couldn’t pull the trigger.  I lashed him in my rage.  I beat him till he lay bleeding out on the floor of his cabin, but I couldn’t pull the trigger.  Afterward, I nursed him to health.  He became the first Dead.  His name was Jackson Corning.  I brought him back to life and he helped me keep alive the others who wouldn’t go to Purgatory, he renamed himself Aaron Century, though I always called him Aaron the Dead.”

Lead’s face turned white.  He tried to swallow against the lump in his throat.  Anxiety filled his chest with imaginary needles.  Terence saw Lead’s panic.   He nodded knowingly at the Preacher.

“I put Century under the blanket.”  Lead said.  “I gave him the choice and he attacked me.”

Lead rubbed the numb palm of his left hand against the bubbled scar on his chest.

“I know,” Terence said solemnly.  “Just like I knew they’d send you to me after Century was put down.  If they figured out Century, they’d know about me.  I don’t agree with how Century took after you, but I knew after he was laid low you’d come for me.”

Terence leaned against a wall.

“I didn’t know if you’d put me under until I saw you.  One look and I knew.  You’re not mindless, kid.  You’re like me, a man with a hole, but not all the way empty.  You’re a man who’s starting to figure that killing doesn’t fill that hole.”

Terence turned his attention back to Eric the Dead.

“We’ve got Crusaders scouring our trial.  Anywhere we set becomes dangerous ground.  I’m sorry, but you and yours need to move to another station.”

Eric nodded at Terence.  Terence looked back to Lead.

“You get to make your choice now.  If you ain’t had your fill of the Church, we’ll knock you out, blindfold you, and put you somewhere safe where you can continue your life until a Crusader or Preacher puts you down.  Maybe you’ll go to Purgatory.  If, on the other hand, you’re done with the Church, you can come with me. I’m headed to New Pueblo.  It’s a hidden place.  They live the old ways outside of Church jurisdiction.  I can’t make any promises to what life there will be aside from different.”